Faithfully
by slipshod
Summary: It takes twenty-six years. But she goes back.


And then one evening she wakes up and thinks _well really this is getting to be a bit silly. _And she puts a few things in a pack and tosses the flowers out the window and goes. Locks up the cottage with a little key and walks off into the field.

The light fades quickly. It's almost winter and the wind shakes the leaves free and sweeps them out on a wild flight before they join the others piled curled and cracked against the damp earth.

It grows colder. The skin betwixt her fingers feels as though it might break open at any moment.

She enters the forest against a shower of brittle leaves, rattling around her in a fury of wind. They rain against her face and catch in her hair and hands. When she opens her lips the wind slips in and fills her with a cold that sets her heart pounding. If she wasn't singing before, she is now.

The dark comes up swiftly. She isn't afraid. There's nothing in the woods that can harm her.

She knows the way to the castle like she knows the way to the chicken coop behind the little cottage, like the path to the village and back. Her eyes do close a few times but her feet continue to shuffle along, unheeding. She cannot go very fast, and she has to stop oftener than she would like, but still. She is going.

She walks all night. When the dawn begins to break she sees the gates rise up against it, stabbing defiance upward into the brightening sky. She draws her hands out of the nest of her scarf and pushes lightly against cold iron.

Nothing happens.

She lays her shoulder against it and plants her feet in the earth. It is no use. The gate is shut against her. But she did not come all this way only to turn and walk back again, and so she leaves the path and begins to walk along the wall. _You must never leave the path, _says the voice of her childhood, and as the dawn trails icy fingers of light across the clouds her fur-lined boots sink deeper into the muck beneath the leaves. And she walks into the thick of the woods.

She stays along the wall for hours, until the stone begins to show through the cracks in the ivy. The sun is high in the sky and she is beginning to be afraid. The morning is wiser than the evening.

When she comes to the garden gate she stops and stands back. It is not cold wrought iron spiking up into spear points, but a rough wooden gate of close-fitting planks, round at the top and still smooth after all these years. It was neatly set long ago, and now the ivy has bridged the gap between the stones and the trees have bent down to brush the top of the wall with their stark bare hands. It would be beautiful in the spring. She would stop and wonder at it.

But it is not spring, and so all she thinks as she stands there in the narrow space between the trees is that it must be thirty years since she last missed a meal and now she has not eaten since the night before. And yet she is going to climb the gate.

Between the ivy and the stone and the trees grown close, she manages it. The wood at the top of the gate is rough and cuts into her palm. Hot blood drops twice, one onto her boot, one to the waiting earth beneath.

Somewhere in the castle, the Beast awakes.

1.

It is dark again. She is in the drawing room transforming an exquisitely carved chair from a pièce de résistance into a practical pile of sticks that will burn well and warmly. And she is not thinking about a day spent wandering through an empty dank old castle. And she is not thinking about all the years she spent wondering what it would be to do this, only to find it far colder and darker on her return than it ever was in her memory.

She builds the fire slowly and well, and when she is satisfied with it she does not turn from where she kneels upon the hearth, only extends her hands down toward the light and lets the silence close in.

"I know you are up there," she says.

She can hear him breathing through the saber-teeth that thrust down beyond his massive jaw.

He does not move and even if he did, the balustrade is stone and would not creak beneath him. She turns her torso, shoulders, head. Back and upward.

"What do you want?"

The voice is rickety with disuse. Sounds like it hurts.

"Food." It is the only true thing she can think to say.

The light of the fire catches and refracts in his eyes.

And she cannot stop herself from murmuring, "But it is a bit past supper time, isn't it."

He is mostly wolf, in her memory, but from this angle she sees things in him that she did not see before. How the haunches curve in a way particular to cats, how the brow extends so far forward he must constantly feel as though he is looking out of a cavern dark.

"You're old," says he.

"Yes," says she, "I am."

It's been so long that she was expecting for him to seem smaller, like all the things that seemed so huge in childhood, but she was near twenty then and has not grown since. He may have. Even in the enormous enveloping shadows of these enormous enveloping rooms, he is immense.

"Are you coming down?" she inquires mildly, and there is a second in which the muscles gather and tense and then he is in the air above her. He lands in a crouch in the shadows beyond the fireplace. Time expands silently between them, and then he turns and pads quietly away.

2.

An hour passes. He returns with a bowl of bread and cheese. Thick-fingered with cold and hunger, she nearly knocks it from his claws when she takes it up. Then he is gone again, but she has no concern for the moment save for the food before her.

When he comes back, he has a wooden goblet clutched between his claws.

"Drink," he holds it at arm's length, as though the liquid might burn him.

This time she is more careful, grasps the stem without so much as turning a hair out of place.

"Thank you."

She drains the goblet of water and wonders, not for the first time, what has become of the invisible staff that served here so long ago. But that is not the question she wishes to ask, and so she says nothing.

"What do you want?" he rasps again. He would shout it if he could, she thinks, but he has always been conscious of how the words become garbled when he raises his voice. He can speak clearly if he is quiet.

But perhaps he would not shout it. Who is she to say?

"I don't know," she replies, because there is no point in lying.

They sit and stare into the fire for an hour or two, and then he heaves himself upright, paces the room twice, and stops behind her. And she knows that if she turns now his hand will be hanging there in the empty air, not quite offering, not quite inviting, but almost. Almost.

She turns, takes it, and rises up.

3.

They walk for another hour before he speaks.

"No one has ever come back."

"There were others?"

She does not know why it does not quite surprise her.

"They all left. Madeleine. Annette. Cerise. You."

"Tell me of them," the lilt at the end leaves it in the space between request and command, to be ignored or denied at his choosing.

A quarter of the way through the wide stone hall, he stops.

"Madeleine had dark hair and smelled of pine. She hated the servants and when I growled at her she yelled. She yelled often. Once I covered her mouth while she was yelling and she bit me. Once she threw a vase at me. It shattered against the wall."

"She sounds unpleasant."

"She was. But she stayed for a month and sometimes we would walk together in the gardens. She liked the winding path best. She told me that she hated her father and was glad to leave him. She said he was more of a beast than I." He begins to shuffle forward again. "But she went back."

"What of Annette?"

"Annette smelled like sweat and too much soap. I could tell where she was anywhere in the castle. She was quiet, for a human. She didn't speak much. And she didn't yell. If I growled at her she only looked frightened and sad. I growled at her once and once only." He has stopped again and she is suddenly and powerfully reminded of her exhaustion. It is drafty in the hall but she is too weary to care. She sits down.

"She was taller than you. And she was kind to everything. She would not kill spiders but set them outdoors." He paces, turns and turns again. "She stayed a year."

"And Cerise?"

"Cerise came long after." He is so quiet for so long that she cannot bring herself to prompt him. She can barely see him in the darkness and yet the tension in his massive twisting forelegs burns so clearly it may as well have been midday. But when he speaks again it comes out hollow. "She read too much, I think. And she had...I cannot see as I did when I was a man, but I think her hair must have been red or very blonde. And she wore it loose around her."

There are no fond details about Cerise, no quiet memories to relate in a quiet passageway. Only the hollowness of his voice and the liquid pain that brims in his small black eyes.

And so she sits and waits for him to tell it in his own time.

"Cerise was not like anyone I have ever known. It has been a long time but I know what women are supposed to be in this world. And she was not like them. I feared for her for years and years after she went back. I was afraid of what they might have done to her." He still is. She can hear it. "But a woman like that is not afraid to die."

She closes her eyes and sees a warm cave in the woods, full of skillets and carvings and shelves. Opens them again to an empty black hall.

She lies on the floor and the stone is like ice against her bones.

"What would you say of me, to another?"

"That you smelled of linen and wool. That you had no patience and that you were clever and that you had too many things inside you at once. That you were afraid. But not often of me. Of something inside you." He inhales deeply. "You're not now."

"No." She whispers, "I'm different now."

He curls himself up an arm's-length beside her.

"Your hair was dark then."

"It's gray now."

"And you walked swiftly. For a human."

She walked so swiftly when she was young. The thought of it makes her smile.

"And now I am slow."

"And I would not have thought that you would come back. No one has ever come back before."

Her arms fold up beneath her head and then she is asleep.

4.

When she wakes she can tell by the feel of the darkness that it will not be so long before the sun rises. Her back aches from the stone but it is not as cold as it ought to be. He procured a thick fur cloak and covered her in the night. He has shifted further from her, and when she squints she can see he has stretched his considerable bulk nearly the whole way across the hall.

She rolls over. Puts her cheek against the floor and waits for it to numb.

"What was she like?"

And he doesn't ask who because he doesn't need to. Perhaps he can smell it on her.

"Cerise had a wilderness in her. She was fascinated by my teeth and my claws and my strength and my speed. She clung to my back as I hunted. I killed a buck and she danced. It was a half moon and she threw long shadows into the grass. She dug up the chrysanthemums and sowed thistles and figs."

For a moment or half a moment he sounds as though he cannot breathe.

"She sang to me."

"I'm sorry," she says, for what else is there to say? She could echo a howl down the endless hall and into the open sky. But the sorrow is not hers to take on, and the past is dead. There is nothing for it.

"How long did she stay?"

"Eight months and four days."

"How long ago?"

"Seventy- three years."

She pulls herself upright and leans back into the uneven roughness of the wall. Gathers the robe about her. Breathes into her hands.

"You loved her, didn't you."

"More than anything before or after."

"More than me?"

"Yes."

More than anything before or after. What would it mean to love someone like that?

Oh, she has been kind and gentle and obliging, but that is not the same. She came to the castle out of duty to her father and she left again out of fear for her future. And when all of her sisters and brothers had married and departed and her father had died and been properly buried, the little cottage at the edge of the woods was hers and hers alone, and alone she lived for a long, long time.

And now she sits in a corridor that feels like a cave (the windows are high but there is no moon tonight) warmed only by the presence of a monster sprawling on his side half a meter away.

"If you asked me now," says she, when the hall begins to grey with the first light, "I would consent."

He is too animal to hide his shock. Perhaps it does not occur to him to try.

"Why?"

"Because sometimes love is a pressing feeling in your chest that makes you sing and fight and die for another," she says_,_ "but most of the time, I think, it is a choice."

"Everything," he says carefully, "will be different."

"Yes," says she. "I suppose it will."

"Isobel," he mutters, and then he is silent. And oh, he has an animal stillness that she cannot match, but the silence is hers as well. And in it they regard each other with great deliberation.

Then, finally:

"Will you dine with me?" says the Beast.

And his matted mane catches against the callouses of her palm. He can feel the pulse of her veins within.

She smiles and the furthest shadows in the hall are overtaken by the dawn. "Yes. I will."

* * *

><p>For Clare. You said i should write it, and so i did.<p>

Merry Christmas.


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